Gopher Toil = Slow Soil Boil

Bear goin'fer it.
He has taken to excavating the freshest mounds, snuffling, and chuffing, and then he's off to shred something else.
Feather is more patient and will lie in wait next to an open active burrow. She never captures the gopher either.


The pocket gopher brings up a huge volume of soil over it's lifetime. If you figure in generations of pocket gophers doing this, the surface is fairly boiling ... just in slow motion.
We don't always see this ... sometimes it's because we just aren't looking, but often their work is hidden by vegetation and not as obvious as in the picture above.

The hay field above and below has been burned and the black ash provides a perfect contrasting background to the white subsoil sand brought up by the gophers toil.


This could be early prep for a watermelon field.

To avoid diseases, mostly fungal, Florida watermelon farmers rotate fields into other noncucurbit crops for several years before trying melons again. To make money, they need to harvest as early a crop as possible before more northerly states like Georgia begin to harvest their melons.

I have some pretty rare photos of the live gopher in this post from the past. If you are a newbie, it might be worth a click.

Click.

You know you wanna gopher it.